20 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



able. In fact it has been tried in some places and found imprac- 

 ticable. But, wells or not, wet seasons or dry seasons, rain- 

 fall or no rainfall, Iowa cannot afford to become at any time 

 absolutely desiccated if in any way such catastrophe can be 

 averted. 



But, you say, how is this matter to be remedied? Can we 

 turn back the index on the dial-plate of time"? No; it is not to 

 be expected that original conditions can ever be restored. It 

 is not even desirable to bring them back at all. Public interest, 

 public sanitation would doubtless demand that the bogs be 

 drained. Besides, some system of ponds or artificial lakes 

 may probably be some day established, whose overflow may 

 avail somewhat to replace the lost surface reservoirs which 

 our agriculture has destroyed. More than this, if when we 

 consider the fate of our streams we take into account at once 

 the woodland and the prairie, there has been since the settle- 

 ment of Iowa gain as well as loss. We have lost on the prairie, 

 and aside from recent destructive tendencies have gained in the 

 wooded areas. The second-growth thicket is a much better 

 retainer of moisture than were the primeval woods. These 

 were in great measure open; they were fire-swept nearly every 

 year, and the stratum of leaves, mosses, and humbler plants 

 which in true forest conditions lie like a sponge over the whole 

 surface, was entirely wanting. 



Our new forest has been until recently, actually much more 

 extensive, much more dense, much richer in leaf -mould and in 

 every way fitter for the true work of a forest in the direction 

 of determining the volume of local moisture. We have but to 

 emphasize this advantage to equalize at least in some degree 

 our manifest losses. 



My argument then comes simply to this: I contend that the 

 narrow measure of Iowa's woodland should as such be relig- 

 iously preserved and in a thousand places extended. Every 

 rocky bank, every steep hillside, every overhanging bluff , every 

 sandhill, every clay-covered ridge, every rainwashed gully 

 should be kept sacredly covered with trees; every gorge, sink- 

 hole, should be shaded, every spring be protected, every 

 streamlet and every stream and lake bordered and over- 

 shadowed. In short every foot of untillable land, and even a 

 little more along creek and river-margins, should be clothed 

 with woods, should be woodland, land not devoted to pasturage 

 at all, but land devoted to woods for the conservation, as far as 



